80
PAR T ISAN REVIEW
self-dislike through the medium of Gregers, did not follow this up with
any reforms. Quite the contrary. In the light of the later plays, this con–
fession appears as a sort of indulgence bought for all future sins. The
wild duck in the attic is revived as the carp in the pond of
The Lady
from the Sea,
and here it is the
sympathetic
characters who moralize
on the comparison. The pietistic talk of a "task" or a "purpose in life,"
which has already been heard in
A Doll's House,
is not silenced by the
pistol shot in
The Wild Duck;
it breaks out again, irrepressibly, in
Ros–
mersholm,
in
The Lady from the Sea,
and even in
Hedda Gabler;
once
more it is the sympathetic characters who voice the notions of Gregers
and Hjalmar and who allegorize themselves out of existence. The plays
grow more grandiose as the symbolic content inflates them, and the
scenery changes to cliffs and mountain tops that evoke the painted canvas
settings of Hjalmar's photographic studio.
No doubt there is a good deal of bathetic "studio" art in all the
great late nineteenth-century writers, with the exception of Tolstoy.
It
is in Dickens and George Eliot and Dostoevsky, certainly; they paid
for being titans and for the power to move a mass audience by a kind
of auto-intoxication or self-hypnosis that allowed them to manipulate
their emotions like a stage hand cranking out a snowstorm from a
machine containing bits of paper. This effect of false snow falling on
a dramatic scene is more noticeable in Ibsen than in any of his great
coevals, and he left it as his legacy to the American school of play–
wrights, to O'Neill and now Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and
William Inge. (Shaw, who considered himself indebted to Ibsen, never
learned anything from him, for he did not work in the realistic con–
vention, though he may not always have been aware of the fact.)
If
Ibsen's followers are not better than they are, this may be partly
because the master, compared to the great architect-novelists of his
period, was only a master builder. The "Freudian" character of his
symbols has often been remarked upon, and perhaps his most important
contribution was clinical: he was the first to put a neurotic woman–
Hedda, Ellida Wangel, Mrs. Solness, Nora- on the stage.
But his work, viewed as a whole, seems at once repetitive and in–
choate. Twice in
Hedda Gabler
and
The Wild Duck,
he created a
near-masterpiece. The rest of his career appears as a series of false
starts and reverses in an interior conversation that keeps lapsing into
reverie. The goal of all Ibsen's heroes and heroines-self-realization–
looms throughout his plays like one of his symbolic moun tain peaks,
which the toiling author himself could never reach.
